Opportunistic, multi-master replication systems allow unrestricted changes to replicated content on any machine participating in a given replica set. These potentially conflicting changes are reconciled under the control of the replication system using a set of conflict resolution criteria that defines, for every conflict situation, which conflicting change takes precedence over others. In the past, the main conflict resolution criteria used has been the physical or logical time of the change, with the most recent change taking precedence over all the others.
However, a number of cases exist where users or applications may wish to have additional ways of controlling which concurrent update gets precedence over the others and conversely which updates should yield precedence. What is needed is a flexible method and system for controlling which content gets precedence and is replicated.